


Figure It Out

by prepare4trouble



Series: Little By Little [44]
Category: Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blind Kanan Jarrus, Blindness, Cane training, Gen, Visually Impaired Ezra Bridger, kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-02
Updated: 2018-06-02
Packaged: 2019-05-17 09:27:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14829707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prepare4trouble/pseuds/prepare4trouble
Summary: Kanan tries a new tactic to help Ezra adjust.  Ezra doesn't like it very much.





	Figure It Out

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry it's been such a while since I last updated this series. More is coming, I promise. In the meantime, have this short ficlet set sometime in the future form where we are in the current timeline. Not _far_ in the future, but a little further along than we are right now. I'll probably update the reading order as I post things set before this.

“You did well today,” Kanan said. **  
**

Ezra didn’t reply.  Kanan was wrong; he hadn’t done well in the lesson.  He hadn’t done  _badly_  either, but that wasn’t the same thing.  He wasn’t improving, at least not as far as  _he_  could tell.  He wasn’t getting better, all he was getting was frustrated, and more and more aware of how little time he had in which to learn.

He sighed, and reached up to pull off the blindfold.

“Hey, Ezra?”

He stopped and turned as though he could reply with a glance in Kanan’s direction.  The blindfold still blocking his view of the room prevented it, applying a gentle pressure to his eyelids, holding them closed and restricting his vision to a dim glow from the overhead lights.

“Catch.”

Through the Force, he sensed something coming at him from Kanan’s direction, moving in a slow arc through the air.  Already well attuned to moving objects from their lesson, and without his lightsaber in his hand, his first instinct was to dodge out of the way.  That was the method they had used up until now when training under blindfold; deflect or dodge.  He fought the urge, and instead acted on Kanan’s instruction, raised a hand to catch whatever it was, and turned his face away instinctively.

He caught the object deftly, surprising himself.  It slapped against his palm a little harder than he had expected, and from slightly the wrong angle.  The impact stung just a little, but it hadn’t been a bad catch, considering.  He transferred the object to his left hand to rub the palm of his right on his leg.  “Ow,” he said, pointedly.

Kanan didn’t reply.  Surprised by the silence from the other side of the room, Ezra reached out with the Force, gently probing the room, and located his Master’s Force signature, he was still standing in the same place he had been a moment earlier, he hadn’t left without Ezra noticing.  Not that he would do that, of course.  What would be the point?

Ezra touched the object, puzzled.  It was long, thin, and smooth to the touch.  “What is it?” he asked.

“Figure it out.” Kanan’s voice was calm, instructional.  Apparently the lesson wasn’t quite as over as Ezra had assumed.

Ezra frowned as he began to explore the object with his fingers.  It was a length of some kind of synthetic material, and although his first impression had been that it was smooth, there were actually several thin joins down the length of it.  It was lightweight, round, and came up to just above his shoulder when he placed one end on the ground.  He knew what it was.  He had only ever seen it before, never touched it, but he recognized it now.

He froze very still, his hand gripping the object tightly as he fought against the almost overriding instinct to drop it as though burned.  “You never used it,” he said.

There was a pause before Kanan answered, and then, a little guardedly, “I did.  Once or twice.  That was a mistake.”

“Yeah.” Working from memory, Ezra gingerly covered the few steps to the wall, he found it with his outstretched hand, and leaned the cane against it carefully.  He got the impression that Kanan wasn’t going to take it back if he tried to give it to him, and  _he_  sure didn’t want it.  “Because you didn’t need it,” he added.

“No.” He could hear a touch of frustration in Kanan’s voice.  It reminded him of the old days, when he had been new to the Force, and probably exasperating in a slightly different way.  “I meant it was a mistake because I should have used it more.”

Ezra moved a few steps away from the cane, leaving it behind and moving back to approximately where he had been standing a moment earlier.  Kanan was wrong; he hadn’t used it because he hadn’t needed to, and he had proven that by what he could do without it.  A cane would only slow him down.

“Well,  _I_  don’t need it.” Ezra said.  “I can do this.”

“I know you can,” Kanan assured him.  “I know you will be able to.  But in the meantime…” He stopped, tailing off into silence, and Ezra couldn’t decide whether that was the end of what he wanted to say, or whether it was a pause while he worked out how to phrase the end of his sentence.  It was surprising how frustrating it could be, talking to somebody he couldn’t see, missing visual cues that he had always taken for granted.  He resisted the urge to lift the blindfold.

“No,” Ezra said.  He was either replying, or interrupting, he wasn’t sure which.

There was a frown in Kanan’s voice when he spoke again, and more of that frustration, a little stronger this time.  Maybe he  _had_  interrupted him.  “Why not, what are you afraid of? People…”

“I’m not afraid of anything.”

That time he definitely had interrupted him.  Kanan carried on regardless.  “People knowing you can’t see well? Bad news, Ezra, they already know.”

Ezra folded his arms, pinning his hands under his armpits to prevent him from giving in to the instinct to lift the blindfold and storm out.  “I  _know_  that.  It’s just…” he stopped.  Knowing something and seeing it for yourself were very different things.  He had known for weeks that Kanan wasn’t going to be able to see when the bandages came off.  That hadn’t made it any less of a shock the first time he had seen those formerly-vibrant eyes unfocused and pale.  If people saw him using a cane, they would know it was real just the same.  And worse, they would assume he wasn’t good enough; that he was failing in his lessons.  That he  _needed_  the thing.

He forced out a frustrated sigh.  That was impossible to put into words without sounding like a complete idiot.

“You said it broke,” he said instead, accusingly.

“I said I lost it,” Kanan countered, then hesitated.  “Didn’t I? No, you’re right.” Ezra got a vague impression of movement, and tracked him through the Force, following him as he took a few steps to one side and then back again.  “Okay, I’ll have to rethink the story I was going to tell Hera about why it was back.”

Ezra shook his head, and wondered vaguely whether Kanan could sense that.  “You won’t have to rethink anything.  I’m not using it.”

Kanan didn’t reply.  Ezra listened to his footsteps approaching the wall where he had left the cane.  There followed an unfamiliar sound, a tapping and sliding that could only be the tip of the thing on the floor of the cargo bay.  He cringed.  Kanan didn’t  _need_  it.  Why was he  _doing_  this?

“I’ve noticed you going out less, especially at night.  I’m guessing it’s not entirely by choice,” Kanan said.  “Has your night vision gotten any worse?”

“I have a flashlight,” Ezra told him, instinctively touching the small light that hung from his belt.  It didn’t help much, but it was something.

Kanan stopped walking, directly in front of him.  “That’s good.  I didn’t know that.  This will be better, it’ll work at times when the flashlight doesn’t.  It won’t lose power, and if — when — your sight gets worse you’ll still be able to use it.”

Ezra tightened his arms across his chest, muscles tensed so hard that it almost hurt.

“On missions, for stealth purposes.  You can’t always use a light.”

Ezra laughed at that.  A tight and strangled, but dismissive sound.  The idea was ridiculous.  He really wished he could have seen whether Kanan had managed to say it with a straight face.

“I just want you to try it out,” Kanan continued.  “That’s all for now.  I’m not asking you to use it all the time, I know you don’t need that.  Just try to get a feel for it, then use it when it’s too dark for you to see well.  You  _have_  been going out less, and if it’s because you feel like you can’t see, that means the flashlight isn’t working for you.”

If probably would work, if Ezra had been using it.  But it, just like a cane, would draw attention to him for the wrong reasons.

“When I was first injured, I spent a lot of time in my quarters,” Kanan said.  “That was partly because I didn’t want company, because I wanted to meditate or…” he hesitated.  “Or sulk.  But a lot of the time I wanted to be someplace else, or do something else, and I couldn’t – I didn’t feel like I could – because I  couldn’t see.  I felt trapped.  It isn’t a nice feeling, and I’m guessing you’ve been experiencing a little of that at night recently, right?”

Ezra tightened his jaw.  “I went to the races two nights ago,” he said.

“For the first time in a week,” Kanan added.

He hadn’t known he was being monitored that closely, and he wasn’t sure he liked it.  He didn’t reply.  There was nothing he could say; Kanan was right, he hadn’t been leaving the ship as often after dark.  And Kanan was right about the reason too.

“This’ll give you back some of your freedom,” Kanan told him.  “It doesn’t have to be forever, not if you don’t want it to be, but I think it would make things easier for now.  Not only that, but if you combine it with the Force techniques we’ve been practising, it might help you build up a non-visual impression of the world around you.”

Ezra didn’t reply, yet.  His fingers tapped nervously, still imprisoned under his arms.  Even if Kanan was right – and he probably was – Ezra couldn’t bring himself to do it.  Kanan had to understand that, because he hadn’t wanted to use the thing either.

“What I mean is, you can use the Force to verify what you’re finding with the cane if you need to,” Kanan continued, “while the cane will let you concentrate with the Force on things a little further away.  That way, if your concentration slips, which happens, the cane will take care of what’s in front of you.  I think it’ll help.”

Ezra thought so, too, actually.  Everything that Kanan was saying made a lot of sense.  It was too bad that the very idea of it made him feel cold.  “And what if I say no?” he asked.  “Will you stop teaching me?”

“What?” Kanan sounded genuinely shocked at that.  “No! Why would you think that?! But this  _is_  me teaching you, Ezra.” He reached out and took Ezra’s hand, tugging it out from underneath his arm.  Ezra allowed him to do so.  In the absence of sight, touch felt much more important, and he wasn’t about to reject it.

Kanan gently pressed the cane back into the palm of his hand and backed off a step.

Ezra ran his fingers along it, feeling the smoothness of the material, the weight of the thing, how it was balanced.  It wouldn’t do as a weapon, not really.  If he was stuck without his lightsaber and against an unskilled fighter, maybe, but generally speaking it would perform the task it had been designed for and nothing else.

“Why didn’t you use it?” he asked.

“Because I was stubborn.  And I was angry, and scared.  I didn’t want anybody to think I needed help, and I guess I didn’t realize at the time that it would actually have been me helping myself, instead of relying on other people.  I didn’t have someone there who’d been through it all before, giving me advice.  You do, and it makes sense to listen.”

Ezra touched the tip of the cane to the ground, but didn’t move it.  “You were fine,” he said.  “In the end.”

There was a pause.  Mentally, he filled in the gap with a shrug.  Would he eventually be able to sense gestures like that, or would they disappear from his notice as his eyes deteriorated further?

“I’m not ‘fine,’ Ezra,” Kanan told him.  “There’s no such thing.  But I might have gotten to where I am sooner if I’d acted differently.”

Ezra sighed.  He clenched the cane tightly in both fists, giving his hands something to do as he still resisted the urge to pull off the blindfold.  He bounced the cane against the ground a couple of times.  It didn’t exactly bounce, but it made an interesting sound as it hit the ground and he felt the vibrations travel up the length of the thing to his hands.  “So how do I use it?”

“I…” Kanan sighed.  “I’m not really sure.  As you pointed out, I didn’t use it.  But Hera gave me a quick lesson based on something she found on the holonet, I probably remember a bit of it, and you might even be able to find the same thing.  We’ll figure something out.”

Ezra turned slightly, ensuring that he wouldn’t hit Kanan, then swept the cane in a slow, careful arc ahead of his feet, and found no obstacles.  He took a step, and tried again.

He… didn’t hate it.  There was absolutely no chance of him  _ever_  using it where anybody might see him.  But he understood Kanan’s point.  Comparing what he sensed through the Force to what he saw – or, when he was blindfolded, what he remembered seeing – hadn’t been working for him.  That didn’t mean that it wouldn’t work, just that it hadn’t  _yet_.  But this, not relying on sight at all.  It was… like a safety net when using the Force.

“I’ll try it in the ship,” he said.  “But not out there.“ He indicated the wider base with a wave of his hand that Kanan wouldn’t be able to see but would, presumably, be able to sense.  Or to guess existed.  Either way, his point had been understood.

“Okay,” Kanan said.  “That’s all I ask.”

For now.  He didn’t say that, but it was implied.  Or maybe that was Ezra’s imagination.  Either way, he wasn’t about to venture out looking like a blind person.  It didn’t matter that he would be soon enough.  By some definitions, in some lights, he already was.  Not everybody knew that, though, and he wanted to keep it that way for as long as possible.

“There’s nobody else aboard right now,” Kanan told him.  “If you want, I’ll leave too.  Explore a little, see what you learn.”

With that, without even waiting to hear Ezra’s response, Kanan turned and walked away.  Ezra heard Kanan’s boots on a ladder as he climbed out of the cargo bay, and the sound of the door opening and closing behind him.  He reached out for his master in the Force and did not find him nearby.  His ability at pinpointing distance was still far from perfect, but he could sense the increasing distance between them as Kanan kept his promise.

He was alone.

He didn’t reach for the blindfold.  Instead, he reached out with the cane, clumsily sweeping the ground ahead of him.  He didn’t anticipate any obstacles, and found none, but it was useful to verify what the Force was telling him, and to do so without ‘cheating’ by looking.

He took a deep breath.  “Okay,” he said to the empty room.  “Let’s see what I can do.”


End file.
